When Are Native Apps Going to Die? Sooner Than You Think

The battle of native apps vs. the mobile web has been brewing for years. It seems that we have reached a turning point.

Just in time for Mother's Day, Google announced at their I/O conference that the 1-800-Flowers mobile application will be promoted as a featured app in the Google Play store. This is unique because the 1-800-Flowers Play Store app is a Progressive Web App (PWA). The 1-800-Flowers PWA is powered by the Moovweb platform and deployed into the Google Play Store through a new feature called Trusted Web Activities (TWA).

1-800-Flowers has reported that the new PWA in the app store yields superior conversion rates compared to their native apps. In fact, an A/B test found that the PWA on Google Play enjoyed a 30% lift to conversion rate over the native experiences.

PWAs are websites that act like native apps, including instant page transitions, offline browsing, and push notifications. Above all, PWAs give developers greater control over browser caching and content pre-fetching, which are key to enabling sub-second page loads that rival native apps. And in the eCommerce world, speed equals revenue.

Learn more about launching a PWA in the Google Play Store in a single day using Trusted Web Activities (TWA) here.